Take Control of Your Restaurant’s Orders with Order Manager

Keeping track of your orders is tough in the modern restaurant. With persistent activity across delivery apps, phone calls, websites, and in-person dining, fulfilling orders successfully can be too much to handle. That’s where Order Manager comes in! As Otter’s all-in-one order control center, Order Manager makes accepting, understanding, and completing orders simple.

Order Manager brings your delivery apps together, so you can manage all your online and offline orders from a single place. In this post, we’ll show new customers like you how to view your live orders and order history, mark items as unavailable, edit prep times, enable Auto-accept, and more.

Connecting your Delivery Partners to Otter

To connect your delivery partners to Otter, click on the “Integrations” tab. From here, you will see two options: 

• Connected: All currently connected integrations. 
• Explore: Where new integrations can be added. 

From “Explore”, enter the login information for your delivery partner. Next, select “Enter”, then confirm your store information. Finally, select “All Integrations”, then click “Connect”.

You can explore and add all of your eligible delivery services from your Otter Dashboard. Search for your delivery partner, and click “Connect” to get started. When the delivery partner screen appears, simply enter your delivery partner’s login credentials to get connected. Once you’ve connected your delivery partners, you’ll see them in your account’s “Connected” tab.

Here, you can view the status of the apps, printers, and third-party delivery partners integrated with your Otter account. If an integration’s status is red, then it is not connected. If you need help with connections, please reach out to our support team through your tablet chat or email hello@tryotter.com – we’ll get you back online and ready to take orders.

Managing Your Orders

After you’ve connected your delivery partners, you’ll see them under your account’s “Connected” tab. Here, you can view your restaurant’s active orders, or click on “Completed” to have a look at the orders you’ve already fulfilled. Clicking on an order will lead you to its associated courier and customer information. Remember: courier information only becomes available once a courier has been assigned. 

If needed, you can do the following from this screen:

1) Reprint an order’s ticket. 

2) Mark an order as ready to pick up.

3) Mark an order as “Completed”. 

This helps you manage your workflow, so you can understand the orders you’re currently working on and those that you’ve sent out.

The “Completed Orders” section lets you review past orders with all the information you see in the live order flow. If orders have been successfully integrated into your Point of Sale system, you can see them here.

You’ll notice that a “Support” button follows you across all of the Order Manager’s screens. Click on it to speak to our team if you need help!

Manually adding orders

To manage orders you’ve received through your website, a phone call, or a POS system that is not connected to Otter, select the “+” button in the top-right corner of your Order Manager to create a Manual Order.

Within your Manual Order, you can select whether the order is for delivery or pick-up, add customer information, and specify what items the customer has ordered. Create the order and it will flow into your Active Orders page.

Using Auto-accept

On your Integrations page, you will see the option to toggle “Auto-accept” on or off. By turning Auto-accept on, your restaurant will begin accepting all incoming orders automatically. By turning it off, you’ll continue needing to accept orders manually. 

Auto-accept allows for no-touch order acceptance. Orders will alert you that they have been accepted with a sound, and print a corresponding ticket automatically. We recommend using Auto-accept to avoid missing orders and to save time for your team.

You can adjust your prep time on the Integrations page. If you’re managing a rush of orders and need a little extra time, head here to increase your prep times. Adjusted prep times ensure that your customers and delivery partners know how long it takes to complete an order. 

You can also adjust the length of prep times. You may want to increase times during busy periods, for example, or decrease them at quieter points.

Managing Your Menu(s)

Next, let’s move on to the “Menu” section. Here, you can mark items as “available” or “unavailable”, ensuring that no one ever orders a dish that isn’t in stock.

Your restaurant’s “Menu” section will only appear in Otter if it has been enabled and if your menus are the same across all of your connected delivery platforms. If you run multiple brands, switch between them using the button in the top left of the screen.

At the top of this section, you can monitor your restaurant’s item availability. Clicking on an item lets you see if it is marked as “available” or not.

You can find items using the search feature or by scrolling to them. Mark an item as “unavailable” by clicking the according button. You can choose to make an item unavailable for just today or indefinitely, and you can mark the item as “available” again when it’s back in stock!

To make adjustments to your menu, use the Menu Management tool in your Otter Dashboard. If you’d like to access this feature or learn more, please contact our support team using the “Support” button.

Your Order History

Being able to access detailed reports is crucial for your business’s continued growth. With Otter, viewing and downloading reports is easy! From the “History” page in Order Manager, you can click on any past order to review historical details about it. You can also reprint order tickets here, if needed.

Your Reports

Here, you can see a summary of your delivery sales over various lengths of time. If you click through the headline figures, this graph will update to display your business’s gross sales, order volume, average order value, and average sales per store. If you scroll down, you can also review your restaurant’s performance across all connected delivery platforms! 

More reports can be viewed and downloaded in your Otter Dashboard.

Your Settings

In the Settings section, you’ll see your restaurant’s complete Otter information. Click “Play Test Sound” to hear what a live order coming through sounds like!

If you look to the top right of your tablet, you’ll see a plus sign, a notification bell, and a “home” icon. When you touch the “plus” button, you can input an order manually. This ensures that all orders are tracked through Otter, even if they’re received from your POS system or online store. If you touch the bell icon, you’ll be able to review important notifications from Otter.

With the “home” icon, you can pause your store’s delivery orders (if you’re super busy and need to get caught up on orders coming in, for example). You can pause each of your stores individually, or all of them at the same time. Don’t forget to unpause your stores when you’re ready to take orders again!

Now, you’re all set to use Order Manager by Otter. Remember: If you need help, use the “Support” button in your Otter app to reach our support team. Happy delivery!

Craving restaurant insights – to go? Manage your business wherever you are with the Otter app for iOS!